Antonioni was the best critic of Antonioni, says Dileep Padgaonkar

KOLKATA: The year was 1994. Michelangelo Antonioni was already in a wheelchair. He was coming out of Nandan, which was that year's venue for the then itinerant IFFI. A large crowd had gathered at the entrance for a glimpse of the Italian who had changed the concept of narrative in cinema. Suddenly they found Fernando Solanas, the Argentinian legend who was among the foreign guests, trying to peep over their shoulders. "After all, it is history going!" Solanas said then.

This little anecdote set off an afternoon of recollections surrounding Antonioni, whose birth centenary is being toasted by 18th KFF with documentaries and feature films, by Dileep Padgaonkar. In 1976, when the IFFI jury comprised Antonioni, Kurosawa and Elia Kazan, "I was assisting Ray who was the chairman," recalled the former editor of TOI and author of Under Her Spell: Rossellini in India. One particular evening stays on in his mind.

Antonioni was late for a jury meeting, so Manikda sent Padgaonkar to fetch him. "I went to his hotel room and banged on the door. No response. More banging got Antonioni to the door. 'Why?' he angrily demanded. 'You're required for a meeting,' I timidly said. He went back into his room and banged the door behind him. When I returned to Manikda and recounted this, he merely smiled." Later he learnt the reason. "Antonioni is here with a lady 40 years younger to him," Ray told him.

Later, Padgaonkar had to anchor a conversation for which he prepared a questionnaire of largely political nature. "Antonioni refused to answer any of them since his basic interest was cinema, never politics." The much-discussed alienation of his characters was also not 'political'. After the questions were redrafted, Antonioni warmed up and eventually spoke with so much lucidity about his work that Padgaonkar maintains: "He was the best critic of Antonioni."

The legend's Red Desert (1964) was the first film Padgaonkar watched when, as a student in Paris, he enrolled in Cinematheque Francaise - one of the largest archives of films, movie documents and film-related objects that holds daily screenings of films from around the world. He claims enviable company: Resnais, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Roger Vadim also received much of their film education through these screenings.

In the film to be screened Friday, "Antonioni used colour in a way no one had till then. Red was not for the sake of beauty but to suggest emotion. It stood for emotionally drained, mentally deranged characters," the cineaste said. "This anticipated major changes that would democratise the medium and alter the technology-born art itself."

From the word go Antonioni had marked a break from the tradition that's cinema. Perhaps that is why, when La Avventura was screened at Cannes 1960, the worst thing that can happen to a filmmaker happened. No, not criticism nor censorship but ignominious rejection and crescendo of jeering greeted the film. Such hostility was not witnessed by anyone since 1930 when an anti-Jew group hurled pink ink at the screen showing Bunuel's L'age d'Or. Adding insult to injury Time magazine called it a "nightmarish exercise in tedium." Another critic dubbed it "a wastage of footage." But one week later, L'avventura received the Special Jury Award establishing Antonioni as a symbol of alienation and solitude, just as Kafka and Camus had emerged in literature.

Antonioni, who came from a middle-class family, painted, did theatre, played the violin, loved to write. He contributed reviews to a magazine edited by Mussolini's son, and when the magazine stopped, he started making documentaries. "A brief stint at Rome's film school led to his marriage - and he helped him learn the rules he would unlearn as director."

The landscape was Antonioni's focus, even in People of the Po Valley, but more to tell about the characters. Indeed, "his landscape became a character in his films" that had a narrative of their own, and were filmed in a 'curious' way: "They dispensed with the idea of causality - with all existing ways of looking at cinema, really," Padgaonkar summed up.